Trackbacks In Forums
March 28, 2007
Blogs have a special place in social media technologies because of search engines. For a large number of people search engines are the first place they look for information, and because of this factor, getting a high ranking in a search engine has a lot of value because traffic can result in an audience or customers. The criteria for getting a high ranking on search engines are (1) content that contains keywords your audience is searching on, (2) indexable website, and (2) links from other websites that also contain keywords and content that your audience is searching for. The last element, links, is what gives blogs a powerful place in the world of social media technologies. While forums and many other social media technologies are closed communities where the conversation happens within the website, conversations often happen between blogs. A trackback is one of the tools bloggers use to notify other bloggers that they just wore a post that commented or referenced a blog post. Trackback technology helps a conversation to happen between bloggers, especially if they write a series of posts between bloggers. Though comments are also heavily used on blogs.
As Trackbacks are one of the ways in which people communicate back and forth between blogs. I was wondering if any forum sites allow you to send trackbacks, or receive trackbacks for a public forum? If not it would be interesting to experiment with this technology to see what would happen if we combine trackbacks with forum technology, such a combination of blogging and forum technology would give a website the benefits of both forum and blogging technology.
This webmaster forum for the v7 network community discusses the idea of using Trackbacks and linkbacks for websites besides blogs, there are also some really great diagrams illustrating how Trackbacks and pingbacks work. One problem with the idea of allowing Trackbacks to forum posts is the amount of trackback spam that’s already out there. If you don’t have some moderators for a forum, allowing Trackbacks may increase the likelihood of trackback spam. One solution to that might be allowing anyone to delete Trackbacks to a forum post.
GeoHoliday Vacation Club is an example of a forum that is using Trackbacks, though I was not able to find an example of a trackback on the forum.
Dean Gardner was attempting to build Trackbacks into his forum back in 2005. However, I do not know if he succeeded, the discussion in the forum on this link with colleagues help to describe some of the technical issues around integrating Trackbacks into forums.